The one thing that gamers and game-developers have been striving to get right for ages is realism. Even in fantasy worlds the avatars transporting the story have to be objects that one can bond with. And any constraint that stops people from feeling drawn into the world, destroys that illusion of immersion. There has been alot of research in the area of perception that can help make games more believable and realistic but may also help in reducing the overall complexity of the rendering of images. Because just as mp3s have helped tone down the needed bitrate by psycho-accoustic research, similar gains could be achieved by looking at the research done on visual perception. As one thing is sure, the visual system likes to be deceived. What struck me as odd for example is that it took the video-gaming industry so long to raise the detail-levels for faces, when it was well-known that the human brain has a much higher resolution for faces than for most other things combined. ...
With the increasingly realistic games, that we see nowadays with the so called next-gen hardware (and in alot of cases already with last-gen hardware as well), a new problem arises that isnt technical in nature, but rather cultural at its core. While the majority of the people i know "get video games", e.g. understand their value and the possibly problematic issues surrounding them, alot of conservative people in places of power dont. Or do and just utilize the concerns about video games to help them through their political campaigns or further other agendas. Just like media companies do. And why do they do it? Simply put, because it is so easy. Video games have become so realistic, that the visuals have a huge effect on people who dont play, and the gaming industry usually doesnt object when their intellectual properties are taken out of context in the media. I know that in 10-25 years time we will all laugh about the transitory problems that video gaming has faced and perhaps politicians will try to vilify and demonize other new forms of entertainment that have emerged by then. But sadly alot of issues that should be discussed - instead of scapegoating video-games because it's so easy - will still be ignored most likely as they are today. That is the reason why in my opinion realism is the greatest achievement but also the bane of the industry.